Saturday, 16 February 2013

THE OTHER FALCON: DEVIL'S CARGO

Just by chance the
other night, thanks to TV Void, I wound up watching Devil's Cargo, a
1948 Falcon movie I'd never before come across. It's one of three
made with the famous magician John Calvert as the Falcon, and because
the poverty-row studio that released it, Film Classics, wasn't long
for this world, it's now in the public domain.

The curious thing was
that in this film the Falcon is called 'Michael Watling', not Gay
Lawrence, as he was in the RKO series. This was not a case of
early-onset homophobia, but the change must have been made at a late
date in filming, because throughout the movie, when characters
(including the Falcon himself) use the name Watling, it has been
redubbed, and redubbed badly, apparently by one man who simply
recorded the word 'Watling' each time without any thought for
dropping it into sequence with volume, tone, or pace.

This appears to suggest
the change from the Michael Arlen character was a case of running
into some trouble somewhere, which is strange because the Calvert
films are supposedly based on a radio series that ran concurrently
with the the RKO film series, and their Falcon was also called
Watling, though he wasn't a magician. This requires some explanation.

The Falcon most of us
remember, as played by George Sanders and then by his brother Tom
Conway, was basically put on film by RKO to replace the Saint series,
in which Sanders played Simon Templar. This appears to have been
largely because Leslie Charteris, creator of the Saint, was such a
pain in the studio backside. So when his contract was up, RKO bought
the rights to a short story by Michael Arlen, called 'The Gay
Falcon', written in 1940, and simply continued producing stories
enough like the Saint for Charteris to sue them. You can link to my
article about The Falcon Takes Over, a surprisingly good reworking of Chandler's
Farewell My Lovely, here.

Arlen was a nice name
to attach to the product, bringing both class and a touch of daring.
His big claim to fame was his novel The Green Hat, published in 1924
and considered hot stuff in the Roaring Twenties. The 1928 Greta
Garbo-John Gilbert film Woman Of Affairs is a considerably
bowdlerised version of the story, and the talkie version, Outcast
Lady, with Constance Bennett, wasn't much franker.

But Arlen was as
slippery a character as the Falcon. He was born Dikran Kouyoumdjian,
a Bulgarian of Armenian parentage, and despite his status as an
enemy alien during the Great War began to make inroads into London
literary, and other, society. After the war he changed his name to
Michael Arlen, became a best-seller, had a famous affair with Nancy
Cunard, and was supposedly the model for Michaelis in DH Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover, which makes the choice of the Falcon's name
even more interesting. He also wrote the short story 'When A
Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square', from which the song got its
title. What's interesting too is that as his novels grew less
popular, he turned to science fiction, publishing a novel Man's
Morality (1933) which was generally seen to have borrowed heavily
from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published the previous year.
Since he might be said to have borrowed Nancy Cunard from Huxley too,
this may have been a low blow.

But it lends some
credence to the idea that Arlen wrote his Falcon story somewhat
influenced by Drexel Drake, who published The Falcon's Prey, the
first of three Falcon novels (and one short story), in 1936. His
Falcon was called Malcolm Wingate, and seems patterned on the Saint,
although with a more hard-boiled style, and an ex-cop sidekick called
Sarge. There was also a criminal called Goldy in that first novel,
and you may remember Allen Jenkins playing Goldy as the Falcon's
sidekick in the Sanders films.

Drake's Falcon, as I
mentioned, was on the radio, starting in 1943, while RKO were making
their films, but here the character is called Michael Waring, and he
works as an insurance investigator. Someone may have read Double
Indemnity. I wonder if the Calvert films called him Wingate, and
then decided to cash in on the radio series, or whether there was
some other name, like Lawrence, involved.

Devil's Cargo is all
over the place as a film—Calvert has to do magic tricks and sleight
of hand almost constantly, and in fact the movie has a scene, where
it's pointed out he has two identical portraits of himself, and one,
he says, isn't him but John Calvert. This might be looked at as an
early venture into Being John Malkovich territory. He's also driving
a Studebaker two-door, which seems almost as unlikely as the Roger
Moore Saint's Volvo, which it resembles somewhat, although it looks
more like a streamlined version of Commando Cody's helmet.

The film does have its
interesting bits, especially Roscoe Karns, looking somewhat under the
weather, as a friendly police lieutenant, Lyle Talbot somewhat
miscast as a smooth gangster, and Rochelle Hudson doing a very nice
job as the femme fatale. Her erstwhile husband is supposedly a
Mexican, as played by Paul Marion he seems to be putting everyone on.
Theodore Van Eltz isn't bad as the lawyer revealed to be the worst of
a larcenous lot.

After the three Calvert
movies, the Falcon would make one more return, this time in a
syndicated TV series, Adventures Of The Falcon, with Charles McGraw
playing him as an international agent, when he would have been better
suited to be an insurance investigator. And with that the Falcon was
grounded, seemingly, forever. The one thing the McGraw finally got
rid of was the strange nature of the Falcon's appeal to women: he is portrayed as
both irresistible and strangely childish in dealing with the charms
of the women who find him so—and this runs through the character no
matter who plays him or which writer he is ostensibly based on. A
strange bird indeed.

Note: I'm indebted to the Thrilling Detective website for information about the Falcon and Drexel Drake. You can link to it here.

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